Now I go: tap, tap, tap, tap.
One tap to dismiss my phone’s alarm. Another couple for today’s weather. Then two or three to scan the inbox. Also, social networks, right? I want to know, like, uh, what people are reading? And their new haircuts. And… celebrity deaths I should be mourning. Any new mixtapes? Who went to that weird show? They let David Brooks write something again?
Eventually, I roll sidewise. I stand on my feet. I stretch my arms and make my animal noises.
If you’re like me, this is a small, nice thing, a ritual that punctuates your day. Before the immediacy of the world that curls inside your nostrils and squishes under your feet, there’s this other one, easier in so many ways. Your feeds are a garden. You cultivate them for beauty. The ugly, the hateful, the annoying and the mediocre all get pruned and tossed away.
I’ve been considering this a lot recently because of my new gig. When you get into it, engaging in social media isn’t so different from what I do as an editor of an arts and culture publication. Our appetite for what pleases is ravenous. Anything less doesn’t make the cut, in the magazine or on the feeds.
We are curators, you and I and everyone we know. And the worlds we custom-build are wonderful. So wonderful, in fact, that bus rides are horrifyingly boring in comparison. (Tap, tap.) Also long meetings. (Tap, tap, tap.) Elevators, waiting rooms, sidewalks… you know the list. It is diverse.
'But these places are transitory,' you whisper in your head. 'I have heard this old Luddite lecture, and it bores me,' you groan, pulling your smartphone from your pocket to text an eye-rolling emoji (so cute!) to your friend. Who socializes on the bus, or looks around wide-eyed in an elevator?
True, true. Barely anyone! But why are we in those places, anyway? Where are we going all day?
Me, I wake up to my phone as an alarm in the morning and revisit it regularly to review the appointments I’ve committed to, the ones I might. This, too, is a core function.
We live in an appointment-based society—or at least one that increasingly revolves around the management of time—and smartphones are telecom corporations’ blessing upon it. (The Congolese children who die for their tantalum, their exhausted Chinese assemblers who leap desperately out of factory dorm windows—they suffer for our sins.)
Social scientists have long studied the differences between conceptions of time in the industrialized North versus the global South. Research suggests that in “clock time”-based North America and Western Europe, people “budget” time and make “investments” in discrete activities. Norms about running late, for example, are strict in these societies. When polled, Americans say they feel compelled to apologize after about 10 minutes’ tardiness. Across the Arab world—where they abide by what’s termed “event time,” valuing relationships and spontaneity relatively more—the standard is closer to 20.
There are pluses and minuses to both. To our own “plus” column, add the comfort and predictability of a micromanaged life. Our very identities are customizable, if you line up the work/friend/hobby slots just right. Smartphones nestle neatly between these, both introducing social interactions into spaces generally characterized by “active disengagement” and adding new ways to self-customize through content curation. If not for yourself and your idea of your “personal brand,” online advertisers and the NSA are keenly interested, anyway.
But we lose something more important than our data in this arrangement. When I stare at a smartphone, my surroundings wither away. That’s part of its charm. As reality fades in and out all day, though—first thing in the morning and last thing at night and sometimes in between and also when your pants vibrate and sometimes when you think they are but not—at some point you must wonder: what am I escaping?
To put it differently, what are we editing out of our world? Is it the silence, the long stillnesses? The wandering minds that think strange thoughts during them? Those ugly spaces around us, their tired and broken residents?
Shouldn’t we stop, feel, know and understand these things deeply as part of our shared reality?
Unlike a good art magazine or a respectable Twitter feed, the living world is so often brutal, sickening, mind-numbing. What happens when nobody stops and notices, and no one considers what it needs to become better?
When our eyes are glazed—locked onto carefully-manicured screens or the carefully-manicured lifestyles they complement—we are also blinded to our sense of inner possibility. We are, after all, just sitting around, tapping. No surprises there; nothing to knock you off course. 'Oh, beautiful,' you think, both to the photo someone shared and the job interview you just snagged.
Then rush off.
Seeing—really seeing things as they are—and wandering are harder, scarier. But they’re a way to live.
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